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Night with the Yankees 



A LECTURE 



DELIVERED TN THE TOWN HALL, CAMBRIDGE 
ON MARCH 30, 1S6S 



BY 



ALEXANDER MACMILLAN 




uJ^'- 



Privately Pi-intcd 

MAY I. MDCCCLXVIII. 



^f^y^ 



58592 



A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 



You have been invited here to spend an evening 
with the Yankees, and I have undertaken to bring 
these Yankees to meet you. Did not the hmits of 
the time which an evening lecture can occupy, and 
the knowledge which an eight weeks' residence in a 
country many thousand miles in extent, and con- 
taining thirty-four millions of inhabitants, can afford, 
make it evident that I can only give you a small 
part of a very great and very complex whole, I 
might feel that I have been somewhat presumptuous 
in this enterprise. 

But my aim will not be to give you a judgment 
of the American people as a whole ; for the simple 
reason, that I have not formed such a judgmxnt. I 
will endeavour to confine myself strictly to stating 
things I actually saw, and giving such estimates as 
I can of what came within the range of my own 
experience, or learnt at first hand from what seemed 



4 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

to me trustworthy authority. The craving which 
seems to haunt so many persons, both readers and 
writers, for complete rounded judgments of men 
and classes and nations, seems to me one of the 
most unhealthy in its nature, and injurious in its 
consequences, that can infect the mind and narrow 
the heart of man. 

When you think seriously of the matter, can you 
help perceiving that it is next to impossible for a 
man passing through, or residing temporarily in, a 
a country with a large and varied population such 
as exists in America, to acquire more than a partial 
view of it, its people, its social, or even political, 
institutions. He sees in a necessarily superficial 
way the people who are living in his hotel, or a few 
private families to whom he may have had introduc- 
tions. There are thousands of other families, all of 
them different in character, varying in intelligence, 
in moral tone, in culture, of whom he sees nothing. 
Even those whom he does see, he sees only in 
one or two aspects. If he is a politician — say " Our 
own Correspondent" for some party newspaper — 
he is naturally thrown most among those whose 
opinions he most sympathises with. Unless he is 
of superhuman virtue he can hardly but be biased 
more or less by his own opinions, and the opinions 
of those he associates with. A man's own personal 
tastes, and habits too, will have much to do with 
the class of persons he sees, and even with what is 



A LECTURE. 5 

exhibited to him in any class he comes across. A 
man who is used to fast or fashionable society at 
home, and who enjoys such society, will probably 
find it in abundance in the large towns of most 
civilized countries. Another, who by some process 
has educated himself into an outrageously exagger- 
ated view of the extent and importance of certain 
abnormal domestic relations, will see hardly any- 
thing else, and will present a picture of society with 
the confidence of a master and the air of a philo- 
sopher that will make the whole People he pretends 
to depict stare in astonished indignation, or laugh 
in contemptuous scorn. But a man who goes 
to a new country with reasonable diffidence and 
open-mindedness, resolved to the best of his ability 
to see the reality of things in this new and unknown 
society, will find it by no means easy, and will be 
by no means anxious to form, or to give utterance 
to, large and sweeping judgments. 

How hard a task, indeed, it is to acquire a really 
full and well-proportioned knowledge even of the 
country in which one has been born and bred, and 
lived all one's days — at least, how hard it is for 
ordinary human beings. Those wonderful intelli- 
gences — one dare not call them men or women ; 
their insight must belong to higher or lower spheres 
than common humanity can command — who con- 
descend, in weekly journals, to delight and instruct 
us concerninLT the innermost moods of " The Girl of 



O ./ NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

the Period," or "The Mother," or "The School- 
boy," or the " Working Man," with such unerring 
vision and such final judgment, He quite out oi the 
ken of ordinary men and women. But let any of 
us who have no claims to any such astonishing 
omniscience, ask ourselves what we really know of 
our own country as a whole. Think what large 
classes in England we know only from hearsay 
reports, paragraphs in the newspapers, often biased 
by political or social prejudices, prejudices honest 
enough perhaps, and not wilfully or unkindly enter- 
tained. What does Belgravia know of Whitechapel .'' 
what does a studious literary or scientific man, as a 
rule, know of the commercial or of the labouring 
classes .-' Nay, what does any man really knoiv of 
his next door neighbour. How easy it is for one 
to live in a town or in a neighbourhood, and 
at the end of ten or even twenty years discover 
some large and important class of persons, or class 
of moral action, good or evil, of which he knew 
nothing before. 

When the prophet Elijah came to Horeb, the 
mount of God, with the terrible conviction on his 
mind that he only was left of the true worshippers 
of Jehovah in Israel, the still small voice that came 
to him in the cave, after the wind and the earth- 
quake and the fire, made known to him for the 
first time that there were in Israel seven thousand 
that had not bowed the knee to Baal. When will 



A LECTURE. 7 

that still small voice, ringing down eighteen Christian 
centuries, reach Christian hearts and guide Christian 
feeling and thought and action, bringing home to 
them the lesson, " Judge not that ye be not judged." 
But even on a much lower level than is given to 
us in Horeb, or in that other and still more sacred 
mount, we might feel how careful we should be in 
forming a judgment of so vast and new and com- 
plex a country as America is. Think of the great 
variety of nationalities that are pouring into it their 
thousands and tens of thousands every year. 
During the twenty years beginning with 1847 and 
ending with 1866, over three millions six hundred 
thousand emigrants landed at New York. Of these 
Ireland furnishes a million and a half, Germany 
nearly as many, England and Scotland together 
over half a million. Besides these France, Switzer- 
land, Sweden, Poland, and other countries furnish 
their quota. If w^e take the original settlers, who 
were as a rule mostly English, with an infusion of 
old Dutch blood, not numerically large, we will find 
that considerably the larger proportion undoubtedly 
are of our common Anglo-Saxon stock, substantially 
our countrymen, even if we do not admit — alas that 
we cannot ! — that the Irish are not. Think what a 
complex mass this is to form a judgment of I will 
not attempt myself to do so, nor ask you to do more 
than receive my experiences for what you find them 
worth. They are necessarily partial, for I only saw 



8 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

part ; if they lead you to think more favourably of 
the Americans than you hitherto have done, I shall 
certainly not regret ; for I deeply agree with the 
sentiment I used to hear from a venerable and wise 
old lady when I was a boy, " You cannot do wrong 
to think as well as possible of every body you 
meet. " 

I have no doubt that my experience of America 
was in many respects exceptionally good. Still it 
represents one element of society there, and I saw 
a considerable variety of classes and travelled over 
a considerable space of territory. 

The first sight I had of the country was very im- 
pressive to me. The day and the night before we 
sighted land had been very foggy — v/e could not 
see many hundred yards before us — and the hideous 
fog-whistle, sounding almost incessantly to warn 
unseen vessels of our approach, had been ringing in 
our ears with a music as sweet as the voice of a 
disconsolate cow, and made one feel dreary to the 
last degree. I was on deck with a good many 
other passengers when we passed Sandy Hook 
Lighthouse, a little before four o'clock, on a still 
August morning. The growing day slowly revealed 
to us the magnificent bays, outer and inner, of New 
York. The shores on either hand were beautifully 
wooded, with gentle heights, studded with frequent 
houses of all sorts and sizes, villas and mansions, 
mostly. I was told, of New York merchants, who in 



A LECTURE. 9 

the summer live generally out of town. As we 
passed through the Narrows, as they call the little 
strait connecting the inner with the outer bay, we 
came into full view of New York harbour with its 
twin cities of New York and Brooklyn stretching up 
from the bay, to right and left, countless spires and 
lofty houses struck into vivid light by the morning 
sun. Large river steamers dashing up and down 
and across, serving the same purposes as our 
Thames penny boats do, but bearing about the 
same relation to them that a trombone does to a 
penny whistle. A general sense of vastness and 
largeness of life came over one ; the sight was 
really very grand. 

But not more striking and remarkable than this 
sight was the aspect of some of our American 
fellow-passengers as the vision of their native land 
came vividly before them. They glowed and 
kindled into exulting speech and look. A certain 
hard and half-defiant look, which I fancy character- 
izes most Americans in England, broke off them, 
and they became bright and benignant. One slight, 
active-looking young man, who had sat opposite me 
at the captain's table during the voyage, murmured 
half to himself, half to me, " This is finer than the 
bay of Naples after all." I was told that this 
gentleman had made a large fortune in dry goods 
— which means in America drapery — during the 
war, retired, married, and gone with his wife to 



10 ,-/ NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

Europe to spend dollars and time, and gather 
knowledge and experience. He was returning with 
his wife and their little child, and a French nurse ; 
and, being tired of idleness, thought of taking to 
business again. He was only twenty-six years old. 
He was pleasant-mannered enough. There were 
two English peers at our table, whom after the first 
two days at sea he called familiarly by their sur- 
names. But it did not seem offensively meant, and 
no offence seemed taken. He and other Yankees 
clustered together, talked of whom they should 
meet, sniffed the air of home, laughed exultingly, 
looked benignantly at us Britishers, as if to say 
" Now isn't this a great sight ; America is a great 
country, and we are a great people, as you will find 
before you leave us." It was the exulting crow 
and strut of the young cock at the sight of his 
own barn-door. It was the Yankee at home, — I 
think undoubtedly, as a rule, a pleasanter person 
than he is abroad, especially in England, where 
perhaps the sense that he is often disliked or under- 
valued is apt to give him an air of self-assertion. 

Perhaps I ought to explain here that before the 
late war the word Yankee was a nickname, spe- 
cially applied to the inhabitants of the New 
England States. Now, all Americans, except the 
South, accept and are rather proud of the name ; 
and, from the specimens I saw, it appears to me that 
they need not be ashamed of it. Our old conven- 



A LECTURE. II 

tional Yankee, with his bowie knife, whittHng 
everlastingly at something, speaking through his 
nose, asking impertinent questions of every stranger, 
I saw nothing of, I met of course hundreds of all 
classes in railway cars, steamers, and the like, but 
they were quite as reserved and chary of speech as 
the English are. When one got into conversation 
with them there was no rudeness, no impertinent 
intrusive questions. Their manners among them- 
selves were courteous and considerate as a rule : the 
only roughness I saw, and it was very innocent, 
was among some recently arrived German emi- 
grants. The working man seemed to me at least 
on a level with the best of ours, and his average 
intelligence is undoubtedly much above ours. No 
working man will lift his hat to you, or rise to 
give you his seat because you are better dressed 
than he is ; but he will answer a question with 
civility and intelligence, and make room for you to 
sit beside him with perfect courtesy, as any English 
gentleman would. They are all proud of their 
country, and not unfrequently I was asked the 
question, " Don't you think this a great country .?" 
I almost invariably made a point of saying, " You 
have great opportunities and great responsibilities ;" 
and they did not seem to take it much amiss. But 
I think the feeling generally was, "We not only 
have a great country, but we arc a great people, 
and have done great things." They undoubtedly 



1 2 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

have a large manner with them, large ideas, large 
hopes, and, especially since their great war, large 
memories. A great country indeed America, and 
vast, and I think that its vastness in all ways 
has a most marked influence on the people them- 
selves. 

It is an old idea that the physical character of a 
country has a great deal to do with the moral and 
intellectual character of the people that inhabit it. 
The mountaineer has to use his limbs, and naturally 
gets active and alert — the man of the plain can 
move about more easily, and has a tendency to 
get loutish. Look, for instance, at a Scotch High- 
lander and an English peasant. The man who 
lives in a soft climate, affording extensive outlook^ 
and fine inlook, gets enervated, while keen air braces 
the mind and body. The old Greek, with his ex- 
tensive sea-board and pure atmosphere, acquired 
that habit of adventure into the world of sense and 
the world of thought which makes him a source of so 
much light and guidance to humanity. So America 
is a LARGE country, and the people get large in 
their ideas, in their actions, in their speech. Their 
humour is the humour of extravagance ; their brag 
is merely a large way of putting things. A big 
tiling was a phrase I often heard concerning mer- 
cantile transactions, and a big thing in any region is 
a joy to their hearts. And their country affords 
scope for the dcvelojnnent of this mood. 



./ LECTURE. 13 

But America is enormous not merely in extent, 
its ivcaltJi in every way is correspondingly great. 
Its wide stretching prairie land, at once fertile 
and easy of cultivation, affords to the farmer who 
has energy and skill a ready means of wealth. 
Indeed, it hardly even requires these qualities in 
any eniinent degree, at least at first. The virgin 
soil in enormous tracts, unencumbered by wood or 
mountain or rock, needing the merest scratching of 
the soil before sowing the seed, enables almost any 
one to be a farmer. The wealth in minerals and 
metals is prodigious. Their lakes are seas, empty- 
ing themselves by mighty rivers into the boundless 
ocean ; their wide stretching primeval forests, their 
chains of mountains often richly wooded to the 
tops, the whole aspect of their country gives one, 
even on a cursory survey such as mine was, a 
sense of variety and extent and prodigality of 
wealth in natural resources that is very impres- 
sive. The longer I was in the country the more 
this sense of VASTNESS was impressed on my 
mind. 

Accompanying this sense of largeness in the 
country and the mood of the people, is a certain 
simplicity, naturalness, of-course-ness, if I may be 
allowed to coin a word, that convinces you, as you 
become familiar with it, that it is in no sense put 
on, but is their genuine natural mood. Things that 
are extravagant with us are not so with them. 



14 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

Perhaps the one pre-eminent natural object 
which every one is expected to see — I mean of 
course the Falls of Niagara — is in many respects 
symbolical of the country and its people, though 
not quite in the sense which Mr. Carlyle gives it. 
It pours down its mighty ocean of waters with such 
quietness and ease that it is not till after you have 
been some time looking at it, that its vastness is 
fully felt. They tell a story of an Irishman who 
was taken to see the Falls. His friends were some- 
what taken aback at his apparent indifference in 
its great presence, and asked him if he did not 
think it wonderful. "What is to wonder at after 
all," said the imperturbable Pat. " Don't you see 
all that water falling down that great height.^" 
" Well, of course it falls down, it can't help itself ; 
you would not expect it to fall up." Whether any 
Irish, or other man ever really said this I cannot 
tell, but the story represents, not unfaithfully, an 
impression that one has on seeing it first, and 
indeed one that continues after you have been 
looking at it for a considerable time, an impres- 
sion which, when you realise it, comes to be no 
small element in your admiration. Nothing I 
think struck me more than the simplicity, al- 
most tranquility, of the whole phenomenon. All 
the water-falls in Great Britain might be taken 
from Niagara and never missed. And yet a little 
Scotch or Westmoreland stream seems to make a 



A LECTURE. 15 

great deal more fuss about its little performance of 
flinging itself down some hundred feet than does 
this sea of waters rolling over the breadth of a mile 
down two hundred feet. No description I have 
ever seen prepared me for what I saw. If you were 
to take a mile of any sea coast, say Brighton from 
Regency Square to Kemptown, and imagine the 
land, inland, cut away and the sea pouring down 
the gap, you would have perhaps as good an idea 
as you can well get without actually seeing it. 
Verily, Niagara is a hig thing. If, according to 
some modern prophets, it is a type of democracy, 
it is perhaps worth remembering that one half, and 
that the larger half, belongs to the British Empire. 

Singularly enough, the country round the Falls is 
comparatively flat and common-place, which per- 
haps is also symbolical in its way. Much of the 
country is as tame as the fens of Cambridge or 
Lincolnshire, to which the prairie, for instance, bears 
no small resemblance. There is, however, plenty of 
fine scenery in America. The Hudson River from 
New York to Albany, 1 50 miles, is one long stretch 
of great and varied beauty from hill and rock and 
foliage and water. Finer than the Rhine, my 
American friends maintained. 

As nature is, so is man in his operations on this 
great continent. The ferry-boat, for instance, 
which takes you from Jersey City where I landed, 
to New York proper is like a bit of a street. Wag- 



1 6 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

gons and carriages, with their horses in them, drive 
on to the centre, and on either side are paths for 
foot passengers. It is a steamboat, and is steered 
from above like a Hansom cab. Then the street 
CARS running along tramroads, which the illustrious 
Mr. Train endeavoured to introduce in London — 
I am thankful to say without success — are gigantic 
omnibuses. They carry no roof passengers, as ours 
do, and professedly only twenty-four inside, but I 
have often seen fifty or sixty, of course the greater 
number standing. They are a great popular con- 
venience, it is said. Being low as well as slow, 
people get in and out without their stopping, but 
they make the passage of other carriages along the 
streets they occupy, very troublesome. The railway 
cars, too, are much larger than our carriages, and 
are not separated into compartments, and there is 
only one class. They have sleeping cars for long 
journeys ; and my first railway journey from New 
York to Chicago was a thousand miles, and I slept 
two nights on board. By paying a few dollars 
extra I got what they call a state-room to myself, 
where 1 was separated from the other passengers 
by wooden partitions, and a sliding door in front. 
The whole journey cost me about the same as first 
class from London to Edinburgh. The great 
extent of the country necessitates great railways, 
and naturally they think nothing of long journeys. 
One friend, in Kansas and another at Nashville, 



^ LECTURE. 17 

Missouri, wrote urging me to come and see them, 
the one saying it was only a three days journey and 
the other four. The longest I actually took was 
thirty-six hours, and I was contented with that. 

Their cities, too, are built on a more generous 
scale, as regards space, than ours. I think that 
New York and Philadelphia stand on more ground 
than London, the one with a third, and the other 
about a fifth, of its population. The streets are 
broad, long, and generally quite straight ; the houses 
in some cases numbering over 2000. How would 
you feel living in No. 2001, Fifty-ninth Street.^ 
They have plenty of very fine and various kinds of 
stone, and the architecture seemed to me very good. 
A rich brown stone, almost chocolate coloured, is 
very common, and white marble not uncommon. 
Broadway, in New York, is perhaps a typical street, 
and also typical of at least one phase of American 
character. Many of the houses and shops are very 
fine, were they not defaced by gigantic signboards, 
frequently stuck out from the walls, and even flaring 
flags, making known that Grandy is the hatter, or 
Dingee tJw boot-maker, of the world. The houses 
are solid and well built, and in good taste, but it 
is all marred by this self-glorification of men, who 
certainly were not disposed to hide their light under 
a bushel. May one hope that these defacements 
will get wiped off one day, and the solid work 
remain. Many of the shops, or stores as they call 



1 8 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

them, are very large. One I saw building as a 
retail dry-goods store, a place where ladies buy 
their dresses, a gigantic Swan & Edgars, will, when 
completed, be about as big as Leicester Square. 
The proprietor of this has another almost as large 
devoted to wholesale business. His name is Stewart, 
and he is reputed to be the richest man in America. 
He is not a native American, but a North of Ireland 
Irishman, and has risen from being a porter. His 
private house seemed to me hardly smaller or less 
beautiful than any nobleman's in London. 

One of the most characteristic cities in America 
is Chicago, on Lake Michigan. In 1840 its popul- 
ation was 4000, and it is said now to approach 
200,000. I spent two days there. The streets are 
all wide and long, and the houses are, many of 
them, exceedingly handsome. They are built of a 
white limestone, easily worked when new, but 
hardening by exposure to the air, so that it comes 
to have the look of white marble. But the whole 
place had a raw unsettled look, the pavement dry 
mud on the carriage way, and planking on the foot- 
path. It is the great corn market for Illinois and 
the great lake district. But the whole place had 
an unsettled feeling, as if one were on a sea of mud 
or sand, and gave one an experience as of mental 
sea-sickness. Yet I met some really pleasant, culti- 
vated men there ; and this unsettledness is natural 
in a place which has grown so rapidly. Not many 



-i LECTURE. 19 

years since it was found that the principal streets 
stood so little above the lake level, as not to 
admit of adequate drainage, and were even liable 
to inundations from lake overflows, and they were, 
by some engineering process unknown to me, raised 
several feet above their former level. 

One of the big tilings in America, of which you 
have all no doubt heard, is their Hotels. As I was 
anxious to see one of the true American type, I 
went to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which, I was told, 
would give me a better idea than any other in New 
York of w^hat hotel life is there. They can enter- 
tain 1 100 guests, the guide books tell you, and I 
can well believe it, from the height I was sent and 
the corridors I passed along on my way to a 
bed-room. I here first made acquaintance with the 
hotel clerk — a type of American gentleman that, 
for serene lofty demeanour is, I think, unequalled 
by any of the genus Jwnio I ever met. I was 
perhaps in a somewhat subdued frame of mind 
when I first encountered him. I had been six 
hours in getting my luggage ashore and through 
the custom house, where the officials were at once 
civil and dilatory, so that I could neither get my 
luggage, nor vent my impatience in scolding. The 
day was hot, too, and I had been up since three 
o'clock in the morning. I was, consequently, tired 
and humble-minded when I passed into the grand 
entrance hall of the Hotel, which was filled with 



20 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

men — guests I suppose — sitting on chairs, or 
walking about smoking cigars, A few men with- 
out hats, whom I therefore concluded to be porters 
or waiters, were moving about among them. I 
asked one of these if I could have a bed-room. He 
told me to apply at the ofifice, pointing to a counter 
like a banker's counter, which stood at one end, 
with a desk in the corner, behind which stood a 
gentleman who was chatting to other gentlemen, 
who stood outside smoking cigars. I walked up to 
him and put my question. He gave me a calm 
look of recognition, and went on with his chat. I 
remained passive and expectant. In a minute or 
two he quietly and leisurely pulled out a drawer, in 
which was a number of small cards ; he looked at 
me, went on between hands with his chat, looked 
at the cards again, selected one, and stuck it in a 
little frame hanging inside his desk screen ; then he 
pushed a book to me, in which I saw a number of 
names written, from which I gathered I was to write 
mine there. Then he turned round, selected a key, 
which hung among hundreds of others, each beside 
a little pigeon hole with a number on it correspond- 
ing to a number on the key ; then he turned to me, 
and at last he spoke : " Would you like to go to 
your room now T I meekly replied that I would, 
whereupon he rung a little hand-bell, which brought 
a lad, whom he told to show me to my room, 
handing me the key. The whole manner of this 



A LECTURE. 21 

man had such dignified self-confidence and repose, 
with not a touch of what you could call rudeness, 
that seemed to me inimitable. But I found it at 
all other hotels I went to ; it was the manner of the 
class — the repose that stamps the caste of Vere de 
Vere could not be finer. Once at Buffalo I had a 
slight touch of sauciness, which I was able to snub, 
but it was only momentary, and the man soon 
recovered his armour. Perhaps the excuse on that 
occasion was that there was a great Agricultural 
Show, and the man was over-worked. Once, at 
Chicago, on a second visit, I had the honour of 
shaking hands with one. Whether the fact that 
the bishop had called on me while I was away, and 
left his card, had anything to do with this unwonted 
condescension I cannot tell. But, on the whole, I 
never saw the grand mannci' in greater perfec- 
tion in any class than in the class of clerks at 
American Hotels. Perhaps the fact that they, of 
all that class of human beings who minister to your 
domestic comfort — or discomfort as the case may 
be, and whom we in England^ call servants and 
they, I understand, call helps, though I never 
heard the word used — are native Americans may 
have something to do with this. All waiters and 
porters are either Irish or black. I ought, in 
fairness, to say that, according to my experience, 
these clerks do their work substantially well. 

I cannot say that the American style of Hotel 



22 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

life was to my taste. It lacked the repose needful 
to a mature Englishman's comfort. The dining- 
room at the Fifth Avenue holds, I think, two or 
three hundred guests. During your meal people 
were coming and going, and as soon as your 
last morsel was swallowed you were apparently 
expected to go too. Then their habit seems to be 
to bring all your dinner, from the soup to the 
pudding, at once, and your meats and the dabs of 
half-a-dozen different kinds of vegetables they 
bring you, were getting cold while you were getting 
through your fish or soup. I resisted this and on 
the whole successfully, but the labour was trouble- 
some, and I afterwards betook me to the Brevoort 
House kept on English methods. 

The great extent and the great wealth of the 
land, lead naturally to much more widely diffused 
wealth, or at least comfort, than is common in Eng- 
land, and has surely very important bearings on 
their social institutions and relations. As I have 
said, I would partly attribute to it that habit of 
what we think tall,, exaggerated talk that undoubt- 
edly characterizes generally the American people. 
People have room to breathe, to move about, even 
to brag to their heart's content. But this liberality 
is by no means confined to their speech. We all 
remember Mr. Peabody's munificence to our English 
poor. I found tokens everywhere that such munifi- 
cence is by no means uncommon among wealthy 



A LECTURE. 2^ 

Yankees in their own country. And what is re- 
markable, I think, is that men give in their Hfetime, 
while they are comparatively young, and still more 
noteworthy, that they give with the consent and co- 
operation of their children and heirs. To give a 
few instances : — • 

There is a very large institution in New York 
which combines the leading features of a Mechanic's 
Institute and a Working Man's College, and has 
besides an excellent library. This institution was 
founded and has been sustained by Mr. Peter 
Cooper. And his active and energetic ally in the 
work, who is also his partner in the iron trade, is 
his son-in-law Mr. Hewitt, whom I had the pleasure 
of meeting on my voyage home. Above a million 
dollars have been spent by Mr. Cooper on this 
institution. I was told that about looo working 
men and women get education in all branches of 
learning here, and have the best men in America 
lecturing to them. 

A Mr. Cornell, who twenty-five years ago was a 
working mechanic, and who has made a large fortune 
by some discovery connected with the laying of 
telegraphic wires, has just given half a million 
dollars to found a university in the upper part of 
New York State, He is a hale, hearty man, 
and he and his son, a young man of some 
twenty-five years old, were busy in some con- 
sultation connected with it, during my stay with a 



24 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

friend in Syracuse, who is elected to be its first 
president. 

At Yale College in the beautiful town of New- 
haven, one of the oldest established colleges in the 
States, three several gentlemen had just given 
50,000 dollars each for the erection of museums 
of science and of art, and for a new chapel ; and 
another gentleman some hundred thousand dollars 
to their Art schools. 

At Chicago they are building a really magnificent 
college, that for beauty of architecture will vie with 
any similar building in England, and which is of 
great extent. The funds for the building, and also 
for an ample endowment, are the bequest of Judge 
Douglas, who was the successful opponent of Mr. 
Lincoln for the Senatorship of the State of Illinois. 

These are only a few of many cases that I heard 
of or saw during my brief visit to the States. A 
clergyman of New York told me that a friend of his 
had taken pains to make a calculation of the amount 
of money that he knew to have been contributed to 
various charitable and educational institutions since 
the beginning of the war, and it amounted to several 
millions pounds sterling. 

Indeed, the habit seemed so common that it was 
talked of almost as a matter of course. You may 
judge the extent to which this goes when an 
American friend informs me that in Boston it is not 
considered respectable for a man to die without 



A LECTURE. 25 

leaving money to some public charities. I suppose 
this means that he will certainly lose caste in the 
next world if he does. When men make large 
fortunes it seems far more common than we have 
any knowledge, or experience of, to devote a con- 
siderable part of it to purposes of national social 
well-being. It was frequently said to me, " We do 
not think it a good thing to leave our sons very 
much money ; it breeds idle and luxurious habits, 
and young men so left seldom turn out well." 
There can be no doubt that our own country is not 
lacking in noble instances of public-spirited bene- 
volence, but theirs seems undoubtedly greater and 
more active. Perhaps in these respects the need 
is less pressing with us owing to the many princely 
foundations we have inherited. Part, too, of this 
comparative indifference about leaving large wealth 
to their children may be owing to the prodigality 
and beneficence of nature in the land which contains 
wealth for countless generations. Perhaps, too, the 
knowledge that even the poorest man has, that it is 
always possible for him to acquire wealth, and es- 
pecially wealth in land and houses, has a good deal 
to do with that independence of demeanour of 
which I have already spoken. Hired farms, for 
instance, in the corn-growing States, are quite the 
exception. Almost every man farms his own land. 
Besides this, even in large cities, like Philadelphia, 
a very considerable proportion of working men live 



26 



A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 



in their own houses. A printer there, employing 
some hundred men, told me that one half of his 
men did so, and a friend drove me through long 
streets of substantially built houses, that would rent 
from ^30 to £\o a year in England, that were 
inhabited and oiviicd by working men. 

Let any man consider what an element of sta- 
bility for the country lies in this very fact. We use 
the phrase, " No stake in the country," and point, 
and with justice, to the danger to a country when a 
class in that condition gets too much power. But 
a country where the bulk of the people are well fed, 
well clothed, well housed, and not unfrequently live 
in their own houses, has elements of stability of no 
insignificant order. Demagogues may rant to their 
heart's content, but the elements are not there on 
which they can ply their baleful trade. Poverty, 
social degradation, want of a stake in the country — 
that is the fuel which kindles into fury and destruc- 
tion at their fires. All old States in Europe will 
have to look to that disease, and if they can find a 
medicine for it. America at present is practically 
free from it. There is, no doubt, a good deal of 
poverty, and great degradation, in parts of New 
York, and in some other large towns, but that is 
chiefly among the Irish, who have learnt the habit 
of misery and improvidence elsewhere than in 
America. 

One of the main objects I had set before myself 



A LECTURE. 2/ 

in going to America was to see and learn some- 
thing .of the collegiate and higher education going 
on there. I accordingly visited a good many of 
the institutions devoted to the higher education. 
The one that naturally interests a stranger most is 
Harvard University, in the town of Cambridge, 
which is a kind of suburb of Boston, the capital of 
Massachusetts, and the principal city of New Eng- 
land. Boston has a much more settled look than 
any other city I visited in America. Indeed, you 
might almost fancy yourself in England as you 
walk along its older streets, which are as winding 
and narrow as parts of London, and the houses are 
built of red brick, such as you see in Chelsea or 
Hackney. It is the great literary centre of Ame- 
rica, and here, or in Cambridge, reside the larger 
number of literary men whose names are known to 
us in England — Mr. Longfellow, the well-known 
poet — Mr. Lowell, the author of the " Biglow 
Papers," and also of numerous serious poems, 
which many good judges consider to have very 
high merit — Dr. Holmes, the bright and humorous 
author of " The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table," 
of " Elsie Venner," and of other works which give 
him no inconsiderable place in the World of Lite- 
rature. Emerson lives at Concord, thirteen miles 
off, and is a frequent visitor, and, indeed, may be 
said to form one of the Boston set. Charles Sum- 
ner and Wendell Phillips, eminent political men, 



28 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

who were great leaders in the anti-slavery move- 
ment which primarily led to the great war, also 
reside there. 

I had the honour and pleasure of dining at a 
monthly dinner of the Atlantic Club, to which 
most of these eminent men belong. The conversa- 
tion was of the bright pleasant kind that one finds 
in the best literary circles in England, and had a 
smack of the collegiate tone of Oxford or Cam- 
bridge. They cracked jokes on each other, told 
stories, talked of Englishmen who had dined with 
them — of course were anxious to know about our 
literary men and doings at home. Dr. Holmes 
indulged in quaint humorous speculations as to 
why Yankees had long thin narrow faces like him- 
self and Emerson, and so on. Nothing could be 
more delightful, or simple, or easy. Thackeray 
had dined with them when he was in America ; and 
while we were eating the oysters, which there as 
here are often given at the beginning of the meal, 
they told me that, at his first dinner, they had set 
some of their largest before him, and he had con- 
templated them through his eye-glass for a while, 
and then asked what he was expected to do with 
them. " Eat them, of course." " What, these 
monsters ! — well, here goes." After he had swal- 
lowed one they asked him how he felt. "As if I 
had swallowed a baby." 

" From gay to grave, from lively to severe," we 



A LECTURE. 29 

finally got on the subject of the relations between 
England and America. Mr. Sumner, being the 
principal political man present, spoke most, and I 
am sorry to say rather bitterly, of our temper and 
conduct during their great trouble. Mr. Long- 
fellow was at the head of the table, and I was next 
on his left, and Mr. Sumner on his right, so that 
we were face to face. He said some things which 
I thought unjust, and told him so, and there was 
a little rather hot discussion across the gentle, 
sweet-tempered poet. But other subjects came on. 
Holmes kept uttering his quaint enquiries as to the 
origin of the lankey jaw of the New Englander. 
Some one suggested that they had mostly come 
from old Puritan stock, who never laughed, and thus 
their faces lengthened ; then they had bred in and 
in, which, according to Mr. Darwin's theory, neces- 
sarily intensified any peculiarity after a few gener- 
ations ; that the remedy was to laugh and eat 
plenty of beef and bacon ; and so the chat went 
on. I don't think I ever spent a pleasanter time. 
After dinner Mr. Sumner came over to me, and we 
had a great deal more talk about the relations 
between our two countries, which in spite of his 
resentment he was most anxious to see established 
on the natural basis of brotherly and cordial amity. 
He lifted his tall handsome form and head and 
said several times, " England, with all thy faults I 
love thee still ;" and here, I think, he uttered the 



30 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

feeling that is at the bottom of the best American 
hearts. 

I stayed a week there, with my excellent friend 
Mr. Fields the publisher. Dr. Holmes lives next 
door and I saw him frequently. Such a bright, 
cheery, merry little man, full of sparkle and wit, 
but with a very fine vein of earnest speculative 
power underlying it all, as indeed is the case, I 
think, with all our best humourists of the true 
Anglo-Saxon type. I took a mid-day family 
dinner, and spent a Sunday afternoon with Mr. 
Longfellow ; Professor Childs, well known in Eng- 
land among students of Chaucer and our older 
writers, for his valuable contributions to the science 
of our common language, and Professor Lowell, 
were also there. The whole tone of society there 
had a matured, cultured tone, that undoubtedly is 
more characteristic of England than, generally, of 
America. I don't think I could have noticed from 
their talk or intonation, nor even in spite of 
Holmes' chaff about lankey jaws, from their faces, 
that 1 was not in a society of English gentlemen. 
Longfellow wears his beard in full, so you don't see 
his jaws, but brow and upper face are broad in 
proportion to his face as any Englishman's, and so 
far from having anything sharp in its expression, it 
is sweet as an angel's or a child's. Lowell is 
square shouldered, square jawed, square browed, 
and is reserved, almost shy, in manner, at first 



A LECTURE. 3 I 

introduction. Emerson, with whom I had also a 
good deal of talk, is most like the Yankee type, 
but I know a good many lankier jaws in England 
than his, and his expression is noble and thoughtful 
— the face of a sage. 

The Boston set, as it is called in America, were 
undoubtedly the root and centre of that anti-slavery 
and abolitionist movement which brought about the 
late war. They were the essence of the Northern 
party. They were the leaders of progress in new 
ideas in social and political life. They are unques- 
tionably New America. No great idea that works 
through the States but has its birth-place, or at 
least its cradle there. Like all thoughtful men 
everywhere they have their eyes fixed on the great 
future of humanity. They are filled with that 
noble discontent, without which men would stag- 
nate on the weeds of sloth, a discontent which is 
far removed from mean selfish discontent. A man 
enjoying selfish gratification, whatever its nature 
may be, may be discontented if he is required to 
bestir himself to do some act of help for others. 
Or he may be discontented because his power of 
enjoyment is lessened by being pampered. That is 
ignoble discontent. But a man, who, looking round 
on the condition of his fellow men perceives much 
misery, degradation, ignorance, sees squalid poverty 
in one class, and soul-rotting luxury in another, 
and is discontented therewith, has in him that 



32 A AUGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

noble discontent which is the hope of the world, as 
much as any human emotion can be. But that 
feeling, thank God, is not a modern feeling merely. 
Since the time that Moses, with hidden face, and 
fear in his heart, heard the Lord say, " I have 
surely seen the affliction of my people which are in 
Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their 
taskmasters," there have never been wanting 
men to whom that sight and that cry was in- 
tolerable. No laudation of the elegant, gentle- 
manly manners of the Southern slave owner could 
blind the eyes or stop the ears of men to whom the 
vision and the voice of God, the Redeemer, the God 
of liberty, had been manifest and audible. 

This set of men have undoubtedly been among 
the foremost in all new works which seemed to 
them real human progress, but they have not been 
unmindful of the past, as indeed no such noble man 
is or can be. They did not forget that the tree of 
Liberty has roots as well as branches, and these 
roots they found in Old England. Hence the 
Boston men always were ardent lovers of England, 
up to the time when, as they think England re- 
jected and spurned their love, and took up with 
those who had always seemed to them the enemies 
of both her and of them. English history, English 
language, and English literature were studied in 
the New England Colleges, in a way that they 
were studied nowhere else in America, as indeed 



A LECTURE. 33 

they were studied by comparatively few among 
ourselves. 

I regret that I did not see any of the common, or 
Grammar Schools in Boston. But I have no doubt 
that the culture they afford corresponds to that 
given at the College. I had the great privilege of 
hearing a Lecture given by Mr. Emerson to an 
audience of about 2000 persons, apparently of all 
classes. The subject was " Eloquence," and was 
treated in Mr. Emerson's usual fine subtle manner, 
demanding considerable intelligence and mental 
attention from his hearers. Mr. Emerson had 
kindly given me a Platform ticket, and Mr. 
Wendell Phillips, with true American courtesy, 
made a place for me near the Lecturer. I had 
thus a good opportunity of watching the faces of 
the audience, and felt clear that it was a fit au- 
dience, though not few. 

One institution, however, I did see in Boston, 
intended for the outcast, criminal class of their 
youth, that interested me very much and that 
would stand comparison with similar excellent 
institutions at home. It is a reformatory for young 
lads who have been convicted of crime. My excel- 
lent host brought me a message from Judge Russell, 
inviting me to come to Sunday morning service on 
board the Boston School Ship, where 150 of these 
lads are kept in penal, it is true, but also in what is 
meant to be and is disciplinary, imprisonment. 



34 ^ NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

It was a beautiful still Sunday morning when 
the worthy judge took us on board this School 
Ship, which was moored some two or three hundred 
yards out into the harbour. Before service he took 
us round the hold of the vessel, which is fitted up 
with sleeping accommodation and school-rooms. 
The lads were walking about in expectation of his 
arrival, and all seemed very much pleased to see 
him. They were of various ages, from twelve to 
sixteen. They had almost all the rather hard look 
which a homeless life, or a home narrow and poor 
in morals and intellect, gives to young human 
creatures, and which one sees in our English work- 
house children, as if a mother's love or a father's 
care had scarcely ever warmed their hearts or 
elevated their minds. But a gleam seemed to ray 
out from their faces when the Judge spoke to them, 
and went round from one to another, shaking hands 
with a good many of them. The schoolroom, 
which was fitted out with maps on the walls, and 
shelves well filled with good books, the gift of some 
benevolent Boston gentleman, was also the chapel. 
The Judge read prayers, a selection from our 
morning service. They sang some hymns, in the 
hard, workhouse voice, but heartily enough as it 
appeared, and then a young man — a volunteer 
missionary I fancy — gave them a short, earnest 
sermon. After another hymn the Judge addressed 
them for about ten minutes in words of encouragfe- 



A LECTURE. 35 

ment and advice, pointing his moral with this 
instance, — " Well, boys, do you know that General 
Phil. Sheridan is coming to Boston this week, and 
has promised to come and see you. You will like 
to see him .-* " " Yes, sir," rang out from all the 
boys. " I am sure you will, and he will be glad to 
see you all looking hearty and anxious to improve 
yourselves. But I want you all to know that Phil. 
Sheridan was once a very poor boy, not richer than 
you are. And I want to tell you a story about 
him, which will show you the sort of way in which 
he rose, and in which you may rise : this is how he 
gained his great name in the late war. He had 
been away from his command on some business at 
head-quarters, and was riding back to it as fast as 
he could when he met his men flying before the 
rebels, who had surprised and routed them in 
his absence. He called them to halt, learned how 
matters stood, spoke brave words of reproof and 
encouragement to them, re-formed them, and led 
them against the enemy, who in turn were de- 
feated and driven back, and so he turned a 
miserable defeat into a glorious victory — the 
great and important victory of Winchester. Now 
I want you, boys, to think of this when you 
see General Phil. Sheridan, and to think that 
though you may have for a time been defeated 
and driven back in the path of true and 
useful life's work, yet it is in the power of any 



36 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

or all of you to turn a defeat into a glorious 
victory." 

It was a sight to see this man with simple good- 
ness and faith and love speaking to those poor boys 
in this way ; the radiance of his face, and the ten- 
derness as of a father yearning over an erring son, 
and these poor hard faces thawing wonderingly at 
the sound of such words of hope — surely a Gospel 
in its way to them. Judge Russell is a man in high 
position. It was he who welcomed Charles Dickens 
to Boston, when he had a civac reception from the 
Boston people ; and I am sure it was a hearty wel- 
come he gave him ; but not surely more hearty 
than the welcome he was willing to give to the boys 
who were coming back to ordered and virtuous 
ways. I was told that this institution is the joy of 
his heart, and that he works for it and in it as his 
life's work. He had learned to think of and care 
for these boys when he was sitting on the bench as 
their judge. He has now retired from that function 
to another government office ; and he besides exer- 
cises this noble volunteer one. The boys go into 
the merchant service mostly, and I was told make 
excellent sailors, having, while on board, several 
able-bodied seamen constantly drilling them in 
ship's work. 

Boston is in the old settled part of the States. 
Chicago belongs to the quite new regions of the 
great West. I spent little time in that city ; and, 



A LECTURE. 37 

to say the truth, was so distressed by the heat, 
choked and bHnded with the dust, and annoyed by 
the snarling hum of the mosquito, that my frame of 
mind was not favourable to much study of the 
place. There seemed a large German population 
there dealing in ready-made clothes, tobacco, and 
lager beer. Besides there are a good many Irish. 
I saw gigantic placards on the walls, summoning 
Fenian meetings for the overthrow of England. I 
was told there was also a considerable Scotch pop- 
ulation, for which I hope the Chicago people are 
duly thankful. The Sunday I spent there showed 
me that Scotch ideas of Sabbath were not by any 
means all-prevailing there. I attended service at 
the bishop's church, where was a large and attentive 
audience. I dined with a friend in the afternoon, 
and met a general in the late war, who was partner 
in the principal book-selling house in the city. My 
friend drove me in the evening round the suburbs — 
Chicago seemed to me to be mostly made up of 
suburbs — and showed me the great Douglas College 
of which I have already spoken. 

But Chicago was not my rest. I was bound for 
the great prairie of Illinois, of which Chicago is the 
great market town. You remember that Illinois is 
the birth state of Abraham Lincoln, who, from what 
I saw, was a typical man of the best class that 
it produces — shrewd, thoughtful, public spirited, 
patriotic in the best sense. They are very proud of 



3^ A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

him, and tell many stories of his quaint sayings. 
One was quite new to me, and very characteristic 
of his ready wit and self-possession. When he was 
contesting the State for the ofifice of Senator against 
Judge Douglas, they had both to make their 
speeches on the hustings. Douglas had the bad 
taste to make some allusions to Lincoln's origin, and 
said he had remembered him when he was serving 
liquor behind a bar. When Lincoln rose to reply 
there was a quiet smile on his face. He turned to 
Douglas and congratulated him on the accuracy of 
his memory'. He was born very poor, and when 
quite a young man had, as the judge said, for a 
short time earned his living in that way, but Judge 
Douglas had forgotten one half of the story. "When 
I was serving out liquor on one side of the bar the 
Judge was not seldom on the other side drinking it." 
This stroke, said my informant, quite killed the 
Douglas. 

I spent a week with a farmer in the Prairie about 
lOO miles beyond Chicago. The country is thinly 
peopled, many of the farms being quite recently 
made, and considerable portions not under cultiva- 
tion, or used only for feeding cattle. My host 
drove me a good deal about, and I visited many of 
the farmers, and after their primitive hospitable 
manner took such meals as happened to be going, 
dinner at twelve or one, tea about six. 

One was struck with the completeness with 



A LECTURE. 39 

which they carried the idea of education with them 
into those new settlements, and how thoroughly 
the States have made provision for the educational 
wants of the people. At every two miles or so was 
built a substantial wooden school-house. Nearly 
all the houses are made of wood, a brick house 
being quite a mark of distinction. The land 
is marked out into sections of about six miles 
square, each such section being a township, having 
its own municipal government. The farms ranged 
from 80 to 600 acres in the part I was. Of course 
there are in other parts much larger farms. The 
inhabitants there were to a considerable extent 
Scotch, but there were many Yankees from New 
England and some North of Ireland Irish. There 
was a French colony not far off and a Dutch or 
German one. The people I saw were either 
Yankees or Scotch, and wonderfully intelligent 
people they were. A New Englander I met talked 
to me about Ruskin, Carlyle, Buckle on Civil- 
ization, Lecky on Rationalism, and other modern 
books and writers, with thorough intelligence. He 
thought Carlyle must have gone somewhat mad to 
have written such an article as " Shooting Niagara," 
which had recently appeared, and in reply to some 
doubt I expressed as to the stability of the country, 
answered " What is to disturb us now slavery is 
gone .'' " I said, " I do not see what is to hold you 
together, you can have no sense of a common 



40 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

national life with all this conglomeration of foreign 
elements. The only common feeling I perceive is a 
common hatred to England." "We don't hate 
England, we were only hurt and astonished at the 
part you took, and that will pass away ; we are not 
an unforgiving people. And as for our stability, 
that is secured by the fact that no political change 
could possibly better any man's condition. Every 
man is at once a king, and subject to no other man, 
but only to the law which we all reverence and 
obey." This man was notable for intelligence in 
the district, was said to be not quite orthodox in 
his religious opinions, but he subscribed to their 
common church, and once when I met him was on 
his way with a basket of apples as a present to the 
minister. In every house I visited there was a 
good library, and books like Macaulay's England, 
and Hallam's works were not unfrequent. Pianos, 
or some instrument of the organ kind on a small 
scale, were in many houses, with Beethoven's music 
lying on the top. I could not induce any of the 
daughters of the house to play to me, as in their 
ignorance they thought I .should be a critical judge 
of music. But they cooked excellent chops, or ham 
and eggs, or grilled chicken, and were attentive and 
hospitable ladies of the house when they took their 
seats at the head of the table. To my mind they 
w^ere very pleasant, well-bred, modest ladies, even 
though they cooked the simple meal with their own 



A LECTURE. \\ 

hands. In the Odyssey, Homer tells how Ulysses, 
when bathing in a river on some strange island, had 
to run and hide himself, seeing the daughters of the 
king coming down with baskets of clothes on their 
heads to wash them in the stream. Why should 
not the daughters of an American gentleman 
farmer do the same. Shall I shock my fair friends 
who honour me with their presence that it might do 
them all good to take a hand now and then in the 
wash tub or at the sauce -pan. Unquestionably, I 
think the general intelligence of these simple men 
and maidens was up to the level of our ordinary 
middle class. I did not see any of the schools at 
work, for it was harvest time and their vacation, 
but judging from results it cannot be a bad edu- 
cation. 

I went to the church on Sunday. It was Presby- 
terian ; the one in the next parish was Methodist I 
was told, but every one went to the nearest church 
with little reference to his private beliefs. It was 
a beautiful day when my host drove me with his 
family along the noiseless earth-road through the 
great still Prairie, with only an occasional clump of 
trees, or a wooden frame house, or a strip of green 
ossage orange hedge marking but scarce breaking 
the wide stretch of the level horizon. Thousands 
of gay butterflies or winged crickets flitting about in 
ceaseless, noiseless motion, the myriad chirping of 
crickets in the long grass, so innumerous and 



42 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

ceaseless that it was blended into one indistinguish- 
able tinkle, as if fairy bells were hung on each twig 
of the Prairie weed. " On to God's house the 
people pressed, " to worship in their simple primi- 
tive way. When we reached the church, really 
rather a pretty wooden structure with high pitched 
roof and a little belfry at one end, there were some 
two or three hundred persons old and young 
clustered in knots on the space in front. The 
horses in their waggons or buggies were tied to the 
fences about. Everything had that serene, quiet 
look that the blessed Sabbath feeling gives. When 
we were all seated in church it got whispered about 
that the minister had been taken suddenly ill, and 
could not preach or conduct the service. Shortly, 
a decent, intelligent middle-aged farmer, a ruling 
elder I suppose, got up and told us that it was so. 
He suggested that since they were there it would 
be a pity to separate without worship, and called 
on " brother so-and-so " to open with a prayer, 
which of course was extempore. Then they had a 
hymn and a chapter of the bible was read, and 
then they had three or four similar prayers from 
different members of the congregation, alternating 
with hymns and reading of the bible. The prayers 
were devout, earnest, sensible, and without rant or 
extravagance, such as often characterizes extempore 
prayers. I think the whole did not last more 
than an hour, and the congregation broke up to 



A LECTURE. 43 

cluster for a time in little knots, and tell or hear 
about the minister's illness, and other matters. A 
little enclosure, more carefully railed in than the 
ordinary farm fences are, stood a little way off and 
the gleaming white stones indicated that here too 
was the common note of humanity. A woman 
stole across the road, and passed in through the 
little swing gate, and reaching a small grave bent 
her face over it with that look that one has seen on 
mother's faces before. The community was grow- 
ing up with its memories as well as with its hopes, 
with its sorrows as with its joys. 

I think it probable that this was a favourable 
specimen of the new life in the great West, beyond 
the average. Still it was there, and I cannot doubt 
that there were many like it elsewhere. A marked 
feature certainly was the care almost all the men 
had that their community should improve and 
carry on its mental and moral and religious culture. 
The good of the cojnnuinity and its improvement was 
often on their lips and I feel sure also in their 
hearts. 

In New York I went to one of the Public Schools, 
which are supported by the State, and in which 
any child can receive gratuitously an education in 
English, writing, arithmetic, and some branches of 
mathematics, history, geography, classics, and 
foreign languages. Attendance is not made com- 
pulsory by the State ; but I understood that, in 



44 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

most classes and districts, it is practically compul- 
sory by the habits and opinion of society. I had 
no opportunity of judging of the thoroughness of 
the education given in these schools. An intimate 
friend of my own, an Oxford man, whose tone of 
mind would lead him to be rather exacting as 
regards accuracy and soundness, but whose sympa- 
thies with America and her institutions would also 
make him a not unfairly severe judge, more recently 
than myself visited and very carefully examined 
a good many of these schools. His opinion was, 
that in these respects of minute soundness, the 
teaching was not very high ; at the same time, he 
thought it calculated to rouse general intelligence 
and activity of mind. Much of it is oral, questions 
and answers, and there is a good deal of attention 
paid to elocution and learning pieces by heart. 
My own impression coincided with his, so far as my 
experience went. The opening prayer was over 
and a hymn was being sung when I went into the 
large assembling room. The principal, to whom I 
was introduced by an intelligent young man of 
twenty-two, who had been an old pupil, and who 
did great credit to his training, shook hands with 
me after the singing was over and offered to show 
me all I cared to see. He went on with his ordi- 
nary work, calling up some lads who had to read 
pieces of their own composition, which they did 
with modesty and vivacity. Then he gave some 



A LECTURE. 45 

general instructions about school work, after which 
they were marched off in classes to the several 
class-rooms in regular succession and in military- 
style, to the sound of a piano played by a young 
lady. Several of the teachers were ladies, and 
statistics show that lady teachers are extensively 
employed for the younger boys throughout the 
States. I heard one lady examine her class in 
history, and, as far as I could judge, she did it 
carefully, and the boys answered on the whole 
intelligently. I visited several of the class-rooms, 
heard examinations in English language — the 
derivation of words — and in geometry. The whole 
demeanour of the boys was admirable. I saw 
neither moodiness nor frivolity ; they, as a rule, 
seemed intent on their work, and cheerful at it. 
The principal impressed me as a man of ability 
and earnestness. He had looo boys under him. 
I had seen them all assembled with their teachers 
in the large room, and seen them dispersed to their 
several class-rooms in that rythmic order. There 
seemed perfect regularity in all their operations. 
The principal told me that he had not employed 
corporeal punishment for four years. He was at 
perfect liberty to do so, but found he got on better 
without it. If a boy was very troublesome or diso- 
bedient, so that reprimand was insufficient, he was 
sent home to his parents, with an intimation that as 
soon as they had taught him to obey and behave. 



46 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

they would take him back. This would answer to 
rustication in our universities. It was a great 
terror to the boys, and the mere threat would awe 
the most turbulent. Expulsion was possible, but 
hardly ever needed. A monthly report is sent 
home, signed by the parent, and returned to the 
master, who preserves it. This is called the boy's 
Record. A boy's future career may be materially 
influenced by his Record. The Americans are 
extremely sensitive as to character, and it is one of 
our popular delusions that a disreputable man may 
go from England and get into any society he 
chooses in New York. Nothing can be more 
contrary to fact. A notorious English barrister, 
who was expelled from our bar, went to New York, 
and did gain admittance at their bar, was, I re- 
member, reported by our veracious "own corres- 
pondents " to be starring it in the best New York 
circles. I had the curiosity to ask about him, and 
was told on different and trustworthy authorities, 
that his admission had been obtained in ignorance 
of the real circumstances, that having done no 
overt act since he was still on the roll, but he was 
admitted to no decent society. 

Indeed, the social life and habits of the people, 
so far as a rather intimate and various experience 
enabled me to form an opinion, are as high in moral 
tone, and as punctilious in the proprieties and 
amenities, as our own are. Of course there are 



A LECTURE. 47 

rowdies and fast people ; but, taking all things into 
account, I should think not more numerous nor 
prominent than here. I believe that, socially, they 
are not, as a whole, inferior to ourselves. The 
family life seemed to me quiet, orderly, and tem- 
perate, and the stories I have heard of the forward- 
ness of the children were not borne out in a single 
instance in my experience. I heard young men of 
sixteen and seventeen address their fathers as Sir, 
an old-fashioned custom I have only occasionally 
known in England, which, I confess, is as pleasant 
to me as, shall I say, old Port or old Madeira. The 
wine and the feeling may be no better than other 
modes or vintages, but the flavour is pleasant to 
one's taste and palate. I was an inmate in houses 
where my bed-room was a small closet, where I 
could certainly not have indulged in the pastime of 
swinging cats had my tastes lain in that direction, 
and, on the other hand, in houses where a magnifi- 
cent suite of apartments, bed-room, sitting-room, 
and bath-room, were placed at my service ; and I 
stayed at houses in various grades between. As 
regards the ordinary demeanour of parents and 
children, I should not have known that I was out of 
England. 

With regard to Political Institutions, I will only 
say this : that in no class and in no political party 
did 1 meet with a single person who was, not merely 
not discontented with, but who was not proud of 



48 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

their form of gov^ernment. I met bishops of the Epis- 
copal Church, Chancellors and other high officers in 
the Universities, senators, generals, tradesmen, and 
farmers, men whose origin was from the working 
classes at home, and men who could trace their 
descent, through judges who had been appointed by 
the English Crown, up to Elizabethan courtiers, and 
who were not a little proud of this descent ; but I 
found no one who did not at once, and strongly, 
express his confidence in the soundness of Repub- 
lican Government, and its ultimate power to carry 
their nation to great and permanent well-being. I 
found many who echoed my expressions of satisfac- 
tion with the monarchical and aristocratic element 
in our constitution, as best fitting our country. 
I met with several who expressed great doubts as to 
the wisdom of the rapid progress towards demo- 
cracy recently made among ourselves by a swiftly 
and highly educated Tory Government. But I met 
none of the democratic, any more than of the 
republican, party who were dissatisfied with their 
own. Nor do I think they have any need. God 
fulfils himself in many ways, and God's creature 
and image, man, may do the same. In details, 
there as here, much improvement is desirable and 
possible. 

One of the worst features there is, that so many 
of the executive, fiscal and even judicial offices, are 
dependent on political fluctuations. In many of 



A LECTURE. 49 

the States the judges, and in all, post-office officials, 
go out and come in with ascendency or fall of 
political parties. This is a great evil, and leads to 
frightful corruption. But this, like the mystery of 
our own dockyards, and our shameless bribery at 
elections, is no essential part of the constitution of 
the country, and both, we may hope, will yet be 
remedied. Judges of the Supreme Court of the 
United States, and judges in some of the indivi- 
dual States, are, as they all should be, for life. 

I cannot but feel that you will naturally, and 
perhaps with some justice, think that I have been 
giving you almost entirely the brightest side of the 
Yankee character. I will only claim that I have 
given you my own experience. There were two 
very justifiable reasons why I should dwell on the 
bright side. The first is, that it was the side which 
I saw most of. The other reason for my dwelling 
on the sunlit side of the Yankee is that so enormous, 
and as I think utterly disproportionate, an amount 
of the attention of England has been directed to the 
black and midnight side. Yankee sharpness, Yan- 
kee corruption, Yankee bluster, in business, in 
politics, in journalism, are undoubted facts — no 
American citizen of intelligence or of integrity 
would think of denying that these things exist in 
their country. But is there no Yankee uprightness 
in commerce or politics, no wise, candid speech in 
their Congress, Senate, or Press concerning England 



so A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

and other countries ? After the commercial disclos- 
ures of the last two years is our trade so free from 
sharpness that we can afford to cast stones at our 
erring kinsmen ? and as regards pohtical corruption 
even in high places ; it is not much more than a 
century since an English minister was able to say 
that he carried the House of Commons in his 
pocket ; and though assuredly I believe that now 
no minister could with justice, and in any such 
sense, say that he carried one of its least members 
in the degrading receptacle, yet surely no man can 
be so shameless as not to blush at political corrup- 
tions among ourselves in other regions and in other 
aspects. Our Press ! has it been moderate ? was it 
in the least degree calm and discriminating during 
the four years of that great and momentous 
struggle ? I venture to say that no more disastrous 
stream of untrue, unwise, unkind speech ever issued 
from English pen or English press — hardly even 
from the Nciv York Herald, or the IrisJi Nation. 
We have a Free Press, and God forbid that we 
should ever want it. I believe it to be not merely 
the privilege, but more emphatically the duty, of all 
men to speak the truth freely, aye even what they 
believe the truth. Freedom is the only atmosphere 
in which noble words can be spoken or noble deeds 
done. I cannot exaggerate my sense of the un- 
speakable worth and sacredness of human freedom. 
But the deeper I feel its value the deeper I feel the 



A LECTURE. 51 

enormous responsibility it involves. And he who 
uses his liberty of speech in a light or in a reckless 
mood is guilty of sin which may be called sacrilege. 
The first condition of any speech whatever is that a 
man should have carefully considered the truth of 
what he affirms ; that he should have taken adequate 
pains to understand the facts, or the person, or the 
nation that he speaks about. I am not here to 
discuss Alabama claims or questions about our 
recognition of the South. They are out of my 
knowledge, and following my own rule I refrain 
from speaking about them. But I do know — any 
man can easily learn — about that great Northern 
party and its cause in the late struggle, and I am 
convinced that we — that is the great bulk of our 
middle and upper classes — grievously misunder- 
stood it, and had not taken pains to understand 
it. The consequence was that our Press poured out 
day by day and week by week words that have 
rankled in the hearts of the Americans, and begot 
an alienation, the constant evidence of which while 
I was there made my heart ache. I think they 
are in a bad mood towards us — perhaps not, in the 
majority, of distinct hatred, but of irritation for our 
prevalent tone during their trouble, and consequent 
alienation of heart, — that is too likely to make any 
slightest difficulty issue in insane strife. It is with 
no desire to speak bitter words to any of my friends 
or fellow-countrymen that I now point out our past 



52 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

errors ; but solely with the desire that a right under- 
standing should exist between the two greatest and 
noblest peoples on the globe, and that seeing each 
other truly, they should be, as they ought to be, 
fellow-workers in the great cause of human progress 
and Christian civilization. It unfortunately hap- 
pened that during the late war the party — the 
South — whom we chose to side with, and pet and 
admire and wish success to, was the very party 
which before the war was always seeking to stir 
up ill-feeling towards England, and indeed had 
been in past wars our bitterest enemies. The 
party whom we chose to abuse and wished to fail, 
the North, was and always had been our closest 
friends. 

A passage which I accidentally lighted on in the 
Annual Register of 1812 will show how true this is. 
Boston represented broadly the North ; Baltimore, 
the capital of "My Maryland" of the sentimental 
song, broadly the South in the late struggle. The 
stupid and resultless war of 18 12-14, I believe, is 
generally admitted to have been mainly of Ameri- 
can seeking. We were in the middle of our 
European war with France, and they took advan- 
tage of it. But, as you knoAv, there always has 
been much antagonism between North and South 
in America, one party or the other being uppermost. 
The party which was then in power was to blame : 
which was it ? Listen to the mood of the two great 



A LECTURE. 53 

centres then, on the declaration of that war with 
England. 

" At Boston on the day of the declaration of war 
with England all the ships in the port displayed 
flags half mast high, the usual token of mourning ; 
and a town meeting was held in that city in which 
a number of resolutions were passed, stigmatizing 
the war as unnecessary and ruinous, and leading to 
a connexion with France destructive to American 
liberty and independence. 

" Very different was the popular sentiment in the 
Southern states, where swarm.s of privateers were 
preparing to reap the expected harvest of prizes 
among the West India Islands. Of the towns in 
this interest Baltimore stood foremost in violence 
and Outrage." 

The relative sentiment of the North and South 
towards England, has always been the same. New 
England, which was the back-bone of the Northern 
party, has beyond all question ever been the centre 
of the highest culture, and substantially of the 
highest moral tone in the great Republic. The 
great West, which was peopled to a large extent by 
Yankees, with the addition of many of the best 
emigrants from England and Scotland, was with 
New England in forming the Republican party, 
which was generally anti-slavery and, in its advanced 
members, abolitionist. By far the majority of the 
Republican party were of the best old blood — 



54 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

Yankee blood, and as a rule loved England, with 
all its faults, as Mr. Sumner said to me. The 
Southern slaveholder was the back-bone of the 
democratic party; to him was joined that portion of 
the New Yorkers who pandered to the South for 
the sake of trade, and the Irish almost to a man. 
Alas for the feeling of the Irish towards England ; 
when and how will that grievous hurt be healed .-' 
But there can be no doubt that the sons of those 
who sent out privateers in the war of i8i2 formed 
with the Irish an unholy alliance of hatred to 
England and to the Northern Yankee at once. 
Need I dwell on the lesson which these facts teach 
us. When Southern successes and northern 
disasters were dwelt on with delight and ecstacy by 
our Press day after day, can we wonder that our 
old friends passed from astonishment and pain to 
aversion and even hatred. The result is — and it 
is not less dangerous to America than to ourselves, 
— we have alienated the North and by no means 
conciliated the South, certainly not the Irish, as 
witness the insane Fenian organization. Can we 
yet learn ? or learning, can we do anything to repair 
our past error } The first thing seems to me to be 
to see it. 

It is a common accusation brought against those 
who point out our national errors in dealing with 
other countries, and especially with America, that 



A LECTURE. 55 

tliey are un-English and that they care more for 
other countries than their own. But surely it is not 
an unpatriotic aim to seek that our country, its 
people, its press, its government, should be just in 
its judgments of other peoples, wise in its action 
towards them, should constantly exhibit that right- 
eousness, fairness, candour, on which alone true 
national dignity can stand firmly and unmoved. I 
yield to no man in my love and admiration for this 
great British Empire, in my sympathy with its 
soul-stirring memories of great men and great 
deeds, its vast inheritance in Literature, in Arts, in 
Science, in political and spiritual freedom. I do 
not forget that great men have been among us — 
greater none. I do not forget that 

" It is the land which freemea till, 
Which sober-suited Freedom chose — 
A land where, girt by friends or foes, 
A man may speak the thing he will " — 

as I am doing now. 

But, indeed, it is no lack of patriotism that leads 
me to remind myself and my countrymen of the 
bad habit we have of looking down on other 
peoples, and not fairly looking at them, and of the 
evil results that the consequent misunderstanding 
of them leads to. I am afraid it is an old failing 
and venerable ; but it is a failing none the less, and 
our wisest have always felt it so. Shakspeare, in 



L.«fr 



56 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

the Merchant of Venice, makes the beautiful and 
wise ItaHan Portia, ask her maid, Nerissa, to 
recount all her suitors, that she may say how she 
feels affected towards them. Nerissa, among others, 
puts this question — 

"What say you, then, to Falconbridge, the young baron of 
England?" 

Portia answers — 

" You know I say nothing to him ; for he understauils not me, 
nor I him." 

Falconbridge, I fear, is too faithful a type of a 
very prevalent form of English character along the 
line of its history. Like him, we often ape the 
follies of foreigners without any true instinct that 
will lead us to understand their character or win 
what is fairest and best in them, and so we get mis- 
understood in turn. We do not learn to understand 
their history, their institutions, their social life, or 
even their language, and our self-satisfied ignorance 
has made us often absurd, even hateful, in their 
eyes. Was not this the case for long years with 
regard to the French, for instance. The baneful 
effect has not seldom been felt, its absurd aspect 
oftener. " What silly people those Frenchmen 
are," said the English sailor ; " they actually call a 
cabbage a shoe." He could not understand that 
the succulent vegetable might be as pleasant to the 



A LECTURE. 57 

Frenchman's palate and as wholesome to his 
stomach under the name chon, as it was to himself 
under the name cabbage. The rose by any other 
name could not smell as sweet nor the cabbage 
taste as pleasant. 

Our prejudiced talk mattered less with the 
French, as they had a reciprocal contempt for us, 
and the thick veil of an alien tongue hung between 
them and us. But, with the American, it has 
been, and will be different. With our blood they 
inherit our language, the veil of a different language 
through which adverse feeling may be dimmed, 
does not exist with them. A young English 
country gentleman, who was staying in a Paris 
Hotel, greeted a more learned friend, who called 
on him, thus, " Delighted to see you, Tom ! but 
do please swear in French at that fellow there," 
pointing to a waiter who was standing before him 
with a look of mute, half amused astonishment, not 
understanding a word of the torrent of English 
oaths he was pouring out. But we don't need to 
swear at our American cousin in any but plain 
English to produce whatever effect our spoken 
wrath is fitted to bring about. 

But the language of obloquy is not the only lan- 
guage possible between us. They read our English 
Bible, with its Gospel of peace and purity, of 
righteousness and love. Our Shakspeare, our 



58 A NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

Milton, our Hooker, our Bacon, are theirs ; our 
glorious inheritance of freedom hardly won is theirs 
— nothing can be gained for either by success in 
any possible quarrel. Why, in the name of common 
sense and common interest, should we strive, 
seeing we are brethren? I will do my countrymen 
the justice to say that I do not think that there is 
any sane Englishman who can think of war between 
the two countries but with loathing and horror. I 
am sorry to say that I fear there are some Americans 
neither Irishmen nor Southerners, who have not 
quite the same feeling, and to whom the gratifi- 
cation of humbling England would outweigh the 
disaster that war would certainly be to them not 
much less than to us. 

It would be unjust and ungenerous in Englishmen 
not to recognize the promptitude with which the 
American Government put down the overt acts of 
the Fenian movement on Canada. But at the 
same time, one cannot be blind to the fact that a 
considerable portion of both the people and the 
press, even of that section that, as we might hope, 
should know better, more or less encourage or 
wink at that aimless yet dangerous organization, 
dangerous not less to the Americans than to 
ourselves. To encourage, even by silence, the 
concretion of a foolish race feeling, antagonistic 
not merely to England, but to the English race, in 



./ LECTURE. 59 

their country, seems to me in the highest degree 
unwise and impohtic. That this has been done I 
fear must be admitted as certain. That consider- 
ations of party poHtics may have something to do 
with it is probably true, but cannot be held to 
excuse the fact. But that some bitterness towards 
England aided in the feeling I fear is also true, and 
though intelligible, is neither politic nor magnanim- 
ous, in a great, powerful, self-reliant people. But 
I have a deep conviction that there is, on both 
sides of the Atlantic, a large body of thoughtful, 
far-seeing men — and in neither country the least 
earnest in their patriotism — who will work and 
pray, by pen and tongue and act, for peace between 
these two great countries, peace based neither on 
servile flattery nor cowardly subservience, but on 
manly recognition of each other's worth and not 
less manly tolerance of each other's failings. And 
my hope is deep that their action, and speech, and 
prayer will prevail. 

It surely would be terribly sad to contemplate 
any other issue. That two nations who should 
be in the van of all that tends to elevate and 
enoble and purify and unite mankind, the lead- 
ers of our common Christian life and civilizatio'n, 
should continue to gird at each other instead of 
joining as yoke-fellows in the work of bringing 
about the Golden Year : — this, the chance, surely 



60 ^ NIGHT WITH THE YANKEES. 

is enough to make a thoughtful man consider what 
he can do to prevent it. I wonder whether this 
night we have spent with the Yankees will help 
towards that end. At least it was my aim that it 
should do some little stroke in that direction. It 
may not be the highest ambition possible to man, 
but I do greatly yearn after the blessing of the 
peace maker. 



Printed by Robert MaeLe/iose, Ayr. 



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